Last month, I was asked to moderate a Q&A session for a documentary film called “Raising Bertie.”

Before I moderated the panel discussion with the director and producer, I watched the film. It was a raw and poignant account of black life in rural America.

Bertie County, North Carolina, which has a substantial black population (62.5 percent), is one of the poorest places in America. The poverty line in Bertie hovers around 25 percent according to a 2016 study done by the University of North Carolina’s School of Government called “Documenting Poverty in North Carolina.”

The North Carolina Budget & Tax Center, a project of the NC Justice Center, once described Bertie County as “persistently poor.”

The documentary follows three teenage boys, Reginald “Junior” Askew, David “Bud” Perry and Davonte “Dada” Harrell, as they go through life’s trials and tribulations in the rural South over a six-year period. In many cases, the boys deal with fatherhood, relatives in and out of prison, poverty and economics, to name a few issues they face.

One of the things that stuck out to me in the film was the effect of losing resources such as The Hive, an alternative school for at-risk boys that exposed its students to college life. One of the schools the students visited was Hampton University, my alma mater. When the local school board shut down The Hive, it had an adverse effect not only on the students who depended on the program, but community.

And honestly, the main option in Bertie seems to be the penitentiary — working there or being incarcerated. Either way you look at it, that’s not a good way to live.

Even though Bertie is a rural place, I saw a lot of juxtapositions between Bertie and Chicago. I’ve seen what can happen when poverty and neglect put a stranglehold on black life. People in hurt communities tend to lash out at each other. That’s something that gets lost in discussing what goes on in black communities, from the South Side of Chicago to rural North Carolina.

“Raising Bertie” shows what can happen when people in rural communities who continue to deal with generational poverty have little shot at advancing themselves.

It also shows that if America is going to be “great” again, Bertie County and other rural communities in our nation cannot be left behind.

The documentary is bringing some good attention to Bertie — The Hive received a grant and is now open as a community center, and the NC Community Development Initiative has promised to address the lack of education and affordable housing in the area.

But even the NCCDI acknowledges real change is going to have to come from local leadership. Can Bertie step up?

— Evan F. Moore is a syndicated columnist with GateHouse Media. He writes about the intersection of race, violence and culture. His work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Chicago Tribune and Ebony. Follow him on Twitter @evanfmoore.